Adam slips his arm around my waist and presses his lips to my temple. “I hope your family will stay in Egypt.”
“Me too.”
When we return to the apartment, the dining room table is spread with bowls of lamb stew, small stuffed zucchini, pickled onions, and tomato salad. We take our places around the table; despite the circumstances, this meal is less awkward than our last together. The line between guest and host has blurred, and all of us are united in the goal of helping Mom feel better. She looks less stressed and Adam’s grandma seems genuinely happy to provide comfort by way of enough food to feed a small army.
Even after the meal has been cleared away and the leftovers stowed in the refrigerator, we sit around the table until late into the night. At some point, both my mom and Mrs. Elhadad moved closer to their husbands. Dad’s arm is stretched along the back of Mom’s chair, and Mr. Elhadad holds his wife’s hand.
“How did you get together?” my dad asks.
Mrs. Elhadad explains that they were introduced through family members. “It was not a forced marriage,” she says. “Both of us could say no, but I met Ahmed and—”
“She could not resist me.” Mr. Elhadad is joking, but the way she smiles at him makes it clear that it’s not really a joke. She does the same little shrug-nod combination as I’ve seen Adam do, and it’s kind of adorable. “It was the same for him.”
Mr. Elhadad laughs. “True.”
“I was a deckhand when Beck and I met,” Dad says. “I was living at home in the Bronx with my folks and she was going to medical school at Fordham. We saw each other in a club one night, she let me buy her a drink, and we got married about a month later.”
Adam’s eyes meet mine across the table and my cheeks flame. Our parents are proof that love can happen fast. Maybe Adam and I are proof, too. But our parents lived in the same city. Shared the same faith. And were old enough to make a real commitment to each other. How can our relationship last if I have to go home? Six thousand miles is so far.
I stand and collect the stray dessert plates, needing to get away for a few minutes. As I’m loading the dishwasher, Dad comes into the kitchen. “It’s not like you to voluntarily do the dishes. What’s up, Bug?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah. I’m just tired.”
“It’s been a long few days,” he says. “Leave this be and go to bed.”
Adam’s grandma comes into the kitchen and starts gathering her plastic storage containers. I mime an offer to wash them before they leave, but she waves me off. Back in the dining room, Mr. Elhadad finishes the dregs of his coffee. “It is getting late,” he says. “We should go.”
“Thank you for the food and the company,” Mom says, hugging both women and Aya. “I didn’t know how much I needed this until you arrived.”
“You are welcome,” Mr. Elhadad says. “This we do for friends.”
It is after midnight when the door finally closes behind them. I go to my room, and as I change into my pajamas, I receive a text from Adam.
I am not ready for good-bye.
CHAPTER 33
Our time in Cairo ends the same way it began: in an empty apartment surrounded by cardboard with Adam Elhadad helping us.
OneVision decided not to open another clinic in Cairo—at least not this year—and gave my mother the option of working in either Haiti or Malawi. After a quick week in Ohio, Mom will fly to Port-au-Prince and then take a bus to her new clinic. Because she’ll be bunking with other aid workers in a hurricane-devastated area of the island, Dad and I will live with Grandma Jim and Grandma Rose until the lease runs out on our house. I’ll start my senior year with Hannah and Owen. Like I never left.
Our furniture is like new, no worn spots on the chairs or accidental drink rings on the coffee table. It still even smells a little bit like IKEA. Adam’s dad will sell the furniture for us, but we box up everything we can’t carry in our suitcases, including all the decorative items from the markets. I decide to leave Stevie G. with Aya because birds imported into the United States must be quarantined for a month—too long for a little lovebird accustomed to getting lots of love.
I pick up the Kelleys Island stone from my nightstand. There has never been any question that Dad and I would go to the island one more time, but I thought it would happen after our year in Egypt.
“I want you to have this,” I say to Adam. “To, um—I guess to remember me.”
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and holds his fingertips against the side of my neck. “Do you think I will forget you?”
“You probably should.”
“I won’t.”
“Is that all we’ll ever be to each other? Memories?”
“I don’t know how we can be anything else,” he says. “Six thousand miles is a very long distance.”
“I just—I hate the thought of living in the same world as you and not knowing you anymore.”
Adam holds my face in his hands as he kisses me, slowly. Softly. Heat rushes through me, warming me to my toes. I slip my arms up around his neck, sinking my fingers into his hair as I catch his lower lip gently between mine. We press close, then closer. Kiss for days. Until our breathing is ragged and my lips come away feeling as if they are still being kissed.
His forehead is against mine as he says, “Staying in contact would feel the same as standing outside the kitchen door at the hotel and knowing what is on the other side is not for me.”
“I don’t want you to become a memory.”
My eyes burn with tears as we make another go-round on this endless circle of wanting what we can’t have.
“I always believed dating was haram because it could lead to sinful behavior,” he says. “But now I think it’s because you carry the other person with you forever. I have been changed by you.”
“You made my world bigger.”
“And you did the same for me.”
“So what do we do?” I say. “Torture ourselves by following each other on Facebook? I mean, I want you to be happy, but I really don’t want to see it when your mother finds you a wife.”
“I think our only choice is to say good-bye.”
A tear trickles down his face, and as he reaches up to wipe it away, I take his hand. I kiss his cheek, trapping the tear against my lips, and I think sadness tastes the same everywhere in the world. “I’m still going to love you.”
“And I will love you.”
My dad taps on the open door frame and I pull back, wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.
“I’m sorry to rush you,” Dad says. “But we need to leave soon. Are you finished packing?”
My duffel bag looks bloated as it sits on the floor beside my empty desk, and my backpack might be too full to fit in the overhead compartment, but I nod. “Yeah.”
Dad grabs the bags and takes them into the living room.